The New New Journalism | By Robert S. Boynton

In William Finnegan's writing there is often a turning point, an aporia, when the author realizes his assumptions have been skewed and all is not as it seems. The war in Somalia hasn't simply devastated the country, it's also brought forth a strange but bustling form of wild-frontier capitalism; Mozambique's rebel army isn't merely a proxy force supplied by neighbors, but a dark, complicated brew concocted from indigenous African ingredients. A self-described "specialist in the unexpected," Finnegan writes stereotype-defying descriptions of the kinds of people—young, black, poor, foreign—mainstream journalism tends to dismiss with a pastiche of clichés and statistics.
Born in New York City in 1952, Finnegan moved between Los Angeles and Hawaii while growing up. His father worked in the movie business, and it was during these years that Finnegan developed his love of surfing—a preoccupation that would later inspire him to travel the world in search of the perfect wave.
After receiving a BA in English literature at the University of California in Santa Cruz, Finnegan spent the next four years traveling through South Asia, Australia, and, finally, Africa. He was strapped for money when he reached Cape Town, where he got a job as an English teacher at the Grassy Park High School, a non-European school whose students gave him his first close look at the world of apartheid.
It was in South Africa that Finnegan, who until then thought of himself as a novelist, became interested, suddenly and almost exclusively, in political nonfiction. His first piece of political journalism was a long Mother Jones essay about his experience living in Sri Lanka in 1979. Finnegan's year at Grassy Park coincided with a nationwide school boycott, which became the subject of his first book, Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid (1986).
In 1986 The New Yorker, for which Finnegan had started writing in 1984 (he became a staff writer in 1987), sent him back to South Africa, where, unbeknownst to its owners, he attached himself to a group of black South African reporters at the white, liberal Johannesburg Star. These reporters became the lens through which Finnegan observed the country and his two-part series was subsequently published as Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters (1988).
During the nineties, Finnegan alternated between foreign and domestic pieces, covering wars in Somalia, Sudan, and former Yugoslavia, and writing portraits of places—New Haven, East Texas, suburban L. A.—that proved his compassion and reporting skills were as applicable to America as they were to foreign countries. Finnegan refashioned these pieces into Cold New World, in which he offered a bleak assessment of the lives of young Americans—black, Mexican, neo-Nazi—all living in poverty of varying kinds. Despite America's affluence, he argues, the very people who should most be benefiting from the surging stock market are experiencing a general decline into a state of anomie.
Finnegan is currently working on a surfing-themed memoir about male friendship.